Technology

What functionality would I lose/gain if I switch from Firefox to Librewolf? I'm admittedly an amateur in the privacy space, and I've been pretty content with Firefox + Ublock and container tabs for different profiles, but I consistently get the issue that my browser fingerprint is pretty unique, and I have no idea how to or even if I can anonymize that anymore.

I am

It baffles me people use chrome.

Firefox 🔛 🔝

Vivaldi and Brave have the option to disable the Hangouts extension in settings, which should disable this.

As linked in the article, it is indeed used for "Hangouts" (Meet) troubleshooting.

Or anything Google for that matter. I see a lot of praise on Lemmy for their Pixel phones, but it wouldn't surprise me if they eventually find there was a backdoor in their firmware all this time. Yes of course, I can not prove that right now, but this news about Google Chrome isn't news for no reason. Don't trust anything Google if you care about privacy, it is literally their business model (selling targeted ads).

#SwitchToFirefox

I am "slightly" worried that there's only a single option left. That's only 1 organization's corruption removed from total loss of control over browsing privacy :/

Chrome is the backdoor and you already installed it

Seems google has already done that

You can check this yourself. Just paste this into the developer console:

chrome.runtime.sendMessage(
  "nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome",
  { method: "cpu.getInfo" },
  (response) => {
    console.log(JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));
  },
);

If you get a return like this, it means that the site has special access to these private, undocumented APIs

{
  "value": {
    "archName": "arm64",
    "features": [],
    "modelName": "Apple M2 Max",
    "numOfProcessors": 12,
    "processors": [
      {
        "usage": {
          "idle": 26890137,
          "kernel": 5271531,
          "total": 42525857,
          "user": 10364189
        }
      }, ...

Not an area I'm familiar with, but this user says no:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40918052

lashkari 5 hours ago | prev | next [–]

If it's really accessible from *.google.com, wouldn't this be simple to verify/exploit by using Google Sites (they publish your site to sites.google.com/view/)?

DownrightNifty 5 hours ago | parent | next [–]

JS on Google Sites, Apps Script, etc. runs on *.googleusercontent.com, otherwise cookie-stealing XSS >happens.

Because it's fast and works well enough to keep the fame acquired over the last 10 years.

Effectively Google has a browser extension (just like the ones you'd install from the Chrome Web Store like uBlock Origin) that comes with the browser that's hidden.

This extension allows Google to see additional information about your computer that extensions and websites don't normally have access to, such as checking how much load your PC has or directly handing over hardware information like the make and model of your professor.

The big concern in the comments is that this could be used for fingerprinting your browser, even in Incognito mode.

What this essentially means is that even though the browser may not have any cookies saved or any other usual tracking methods, your browser can still be recognised by how it behaves on your machine in particular, and this hidden extension allows Google to retrieve additional information to further narrow down your browser and therefore who you are (as they can link this behaviour and data to when you've used Google with that browser signed in), even in Incognito mode.